Adversatives Clauses in Brazilian Sign Language

a semantic-functional approach

Abstract

This works aims to present an analysis of adversative clauses in Brazilian Sign Language - Libras, highlighting their syntactic and semantic properties. Syntactically adversatives can occur juxtaposed or interconnected by manual conjunction, which, as we have seen in the data, can be of at least of three types. In this paper, taking into account mainly Lakoff (1971) and Sweetser (1990) works, we present the results that show that adversatives in Libras take semantic values, such as contrast, denial of expectation, correction and negation, acting also on epistemic and conversational domains (Sweetser, 1990). Our analysis is qualitative and is based on spontaneous data produced by Brazilian deaf signers in  signing blogs on Facebook and Youtube.